Read on Twitter
Look. Here’s my thought (not entirely original to me of course). So the sitcoms from that time are kind of the founders of the modern sitcom, and they all have this weird ahistoricalness to them. https://twitter.com/josiahwsutton/status/1275133063283048451
Like, take Leave It To Beaver. You’ve got the ideal suburban family, and the wife stays in her place and cooks, and they talk about God and country and stuff.
But it’s the 50s.
The biggest historical event of the 20th century happened less than a decade before the show came out
But it’s the 50s.
The biggest historical event of the 20th century happened less than a decade before the show came out
And not that they ought to be like "Remember the HOLOCAUST??" But also, the Dad was probably a vet realistically. Or at least some of the characters would be. Even if they weren’t, the nation was all traumatized. But there’s no acknowledgment of it.
If you were to do a legit exploration of an era through the pop art of the era, 50s sitcoms would be terrible. They reflect nothing of what’s going on. You have Andy Griffith being a nice small town cop, at the era of segregation.
What it is an interesting exploration of, though, is the bourgeois ideals of the 50s, and those relied on an escape from the reality of the depression or WWII that happened a few years prior. Relies on this notion that the American economy was just good, and not boosted by war.
It is an idyllic world without the scars of reality. So it’s this interesting focal point for fascists. Like, there are examples of art that push similar religious and familial values without the ahistorical element (i.e. It’s A Wonderful Life).
But what seems important for nostalgia is to remove the history. It’s A Wonderful Life got called communist propaganda by Ayn Rand because, like, it talked about the depression and the war and unions and how capitalism interfered with small town families.
(I’m aware It’s A Wonderful Life is not 1950s, but that’s kind of my point. It’s only a few years prior. Some propagandist shift happens in the 1950s. Especially in propaganda ads which I haven’t done enough research on to write about, but damn they’re bad).
So. One of my favorite photo books is The Americans by Robert Frank. It was despised when it first came out. The main reason was that he was challenging this idyllic 50s narrative that was being pushed in media at the time. Take a look at this famous photo:
Art at the time pretty much ignored the black experience. But this iconic photo poked at that: the bus is literally organized hierarchically. White man > white woman >white children > black man > black woman.
Robert Frank, though, was not an American. He was Swiss. So a lot of his photos are just this outsider fascinated by the culture of America as it is (rather than as it is portrayed in American popular media). And that got him pushed out.
What I’m getting at, is the neofascist yearning for some lost 1950s oasis of sexual purity and stability is not reflective of any actual events in the time period. Actually, Frank kinda showed that at that time, like now, kids be fuckin
But popular art at the time had to maintain an ahistorical approach or else it would acknowledge that economic stability for whites in the 1950s was in regard to the war and a very specific historical moment (not to mention a more equitable tax system, but that’s another convo).
It just became a perfect point for neofascists and conservatives to latch onto because the art is idyllic and ahistorical. It’s often not even explicitly racist, it deals with race by just never showing it. So no conservative has to face the vile racial reality at the time.
We’re just presented with this world with no history and no contradiction. But there was history and there was contradictions, and that boiled over in the 60s. Unfortunately, the neofascist can then look at the 60s as the moment it "all went wrong".
Look. What I’m getting at is this:
Fuck your tin cup milkshakes, you fuckin fascist.
Okay, that’s all
Fuck your tin cup milkshakes, you fuckin fascist.
Okay, that’s all
